Lebanon Hostage Ch. 02

When the power is on, night and day have the same fluorescent lighting. When the power goes out, night and day are equally dark. This makes it difficult for me to keep track of the passage of time in my memories. At a given moment, the only way I can know if it is day or night is to try to remember whether I was last served breakfast or dinner.

* * *

A guard enters my cell unexpectedly sometime after my toilet run, ergo in the middle of the day. I yank my blindfold down off my forehead and sit up straight on the mattress. I am hoping that the guards see my posture as a sign of respect.

The guard stands directly over me. This is alarming, but it's just so that he can be heard over the ventilator. "You need cigarettes?" He pronounces cigarettes as if it were French. He asks the question in the same threatening tone they use to give orders. It takes me a second, in fact, to realize that it is a question, not an order.

"No, thank you," I reply, trying my best to sound humble even though I'm raising my voice. "I don't smoke."

He deciphers this. "No cigarettes?" As if it's unheard of.

"No. But thank you."

He squats down in front of my tub, on the floor beside the head of my mattress. I hear him rummage inside. After he leaves, I discover that he's taken the two unopened packages of cigarettes, along with the box of matches. Even though I had no intention of using them, their absence leaves a hole in my miniature cosmos. I've been robbed. Every time I look in the tub, I can tell something's missing, something's wrong.

Maybe I should have kept them. Maybe I should have taught myself to smoke. It would have given me something to do. I surmise that the nicotine would have made me feel a little better.

* * *

I am constantly anxious. Anxious about the future. Anxious about my ability to survive this experience without cracking. The anxiety spikes into full-blown fear every time I hear the guards unlock my cell door, even when I'm expecting them. I race against death as I scramble to get my eyes properly covered before the door opens.

I am constantly anxious, and yet I am also bored for all but a few minutes of the day. I've experienced this combination of boredom and anxiety before, or something a little like it. It's like the feeling I had while I was waiting to check in to take the GRE. Unlike a couple of savvier test-takers waiting with me, I hadn't thought to bring any materials for a last-minute review, so all I could do was sit there, watching the clock, waiting to be processed, but at the same time stressing about how I was going to perform.

Basically, I sit in my cell all day, day after day, waiting to start the GRE. Except that here, both the stress and the boredom are more intense.

I can't just lie or sit here hour after hour, fretting, stewing, wallowing, feeling homesick, feeling miserable. I need to distract myself. I need to pull myself together and find ways to actively pass the time.

I should be able to do this. I should be able to handle the isolation and the inactivity. I'm a loner by nature. I'm a person who is perfectly happy spending a Friday or Saturday evening by himself. That's how I spent practically every weekend from the time I started college, with the brief exception of my affair with Dale.

Of course, in college, I had things to do. My coursework. I had books—in my dorm room, in the library. I had the art-house theater. Here, I have just my mind.

So what, I can get by with just my mind. Ever since I was a child, roaming alone through the neighborhood, I've invented ways to entertain myself.

I can pass the time recounting to myself short stories or novels I've read, plays, films. I can perform literary analyses of these works. I can sing my way, silently, in my head, through the soundtracks of the Broadway musicals my mother loved, which I grew up listening to. I can play word games: pick a category—animals, places, literary characters—and create a word chain where each item begins with the same letter that the preceding item ended with.

In a spasm of optimism, I think: This doesn't just have to be about killing time, I can actually use my time here constructively. I can think through topics for my master's thesis. I finally have time for my own creative work. I could work out how to adapt my favorite novels into films. I could plan a novel of my own.

On a good day, I'm able to muster up the same determination I bring to my studies. Let's do this, let's get to work. But after some time—I have no way of knowing how much time, I wish they had given me my watch back—even my strategies for escaping boredom start to bore me. I get tired. It's hard work having to create my own entertainment, harder than watching TV or reading a book or watching a movie that someone else has created, harder than idly admiring nature. Here, I can't ever relax into an idle or passive moment, because that will mean staring at the ceiling, or the wall, or into the darkness if the power's out, and the whole point is that I'm trying not to do that because I'll end up anxious or homesick or depressed. But inevitably that happens anyway because I can only keep up the effort of more disciplined mental activity for so long. Eventually, my thoughts start flowing down whatever path of least resistance first opens up, none of them helpful: worries, fears, hopes, regrets.

Those are the good days. On the bad days, I wake up, and the discovery that I'm still here, that it's not a bad dream, presses me flat into the mattress before I've had a chance to even try to rouse myself to some kind of productive activity.

Left to its own devices, my mind wants to turn to either the past or the future. The future is the most dangerous direction to turn because that way leads to either fear or fantasy. Fantasies can be uplifting: I imagine going home, being reunited with my family, returning to school. But they're a high from which eventually I come crashing down. I hear the guards opening my cell, and in the afterglow of my fantasy, I allow myself to think, this is it, they're coming to release me; but then they don't, and I plummet. I can't keep doing that to myself.

If I let my mind float into the past, I can become painfully homesick; I may cry. I'll lose myself for a little while in a happy memory, but at the end, I'm here instead and the happiness dribbles away. Still, that's not as hard as the crash that follows when I fantasize about future happiness.

My memories aren't always happy. I have a lot of time available to spend on regrets and recriminations. I wish I'd been more appreciative of what my mother went through, raising two small boys as a young widow. I wish I'd been more helpful to her, more gracious about the responsibilities I had to shoulder. I wish that, growing up, I had been more of a friend to my little brother Chris, less of a tyrannical babysitter. I wish that when my mother remarried, I hadn't been an adolescent prick to my stepfather, spurning him when he was trying so hard to connect. I wish that in college I hadn't pulled back so much from my family, from Bernie. I wish I'd actually told Bernie in words, at some point, how much he has meant in my life.

Bernie... That leads me to the darkest regrets. That I ever came to this country. That I didn't take the warnings more seriously. That I ever went to that gay bar and got myself into the emotional mess that made me so desperate to come here.

I know my kidnapping isn't a punishment for my having gay sex. The sex was wrong, it was an offense, a perversion of God's natural order; but God didn't send men to kidnap me because of it, he doesn't work that way, I understand that. But there's no escaping the fact that my kidnapping is the consequence of my having gay sex. Going to the bar, going home with Dale, were the first two falling dominoes in the long chain that several months later has ended with me here in this cell. If I just hadn't done it, if I'd had more self-control...

I'm sorry, God. Forgive me. Forgive me. I will never, ever do it again. I won't read about it anymore. I won't allow myself the fantasies. I will be chaste, I swear to you. I will do whatever you want me to do with my life. But please, get me my life back.

* * *

On two occasions, the young English-speaker who "oriented" me on the day of my kidnapping returns to interrogate me. I sit on a metal folding chair in the guards' area, aware of men moving in the room around me. The television plays loudly in the background throughout the interrogation. The noise distracts me, makes it hard for me to focus.

The interrogator assembles my autobiography, my family history. He wants to know where my father was born, and my father's father, what my father does for a living, how much money he makes. He asks about my studies, my employment, who pays me, how much. What other countries have I ever traveled to, and why. Many questions about Bernie's relief mission, what it does, exactly where it operates in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon, what other countries the mission operates in, how large its budget is, where it gets its funding. They want to know about the primary school here in Beirut where I was working, its relationship to Bernie's mission, other connections it may have to foreign agencies. I hand over Adnan's name, and that of Rabeeh, the teacher I assisted. Thankfully, I can't remember either's last name, but I still feel like I'm betraying them. The interrogator wants the names and addresses of other Westerners I know living in Lebanon, but I don't have any to give.

I am fully cooperative, although ashamed of it. I answer every question to the best of my abilities; I offer any scrap of information I have, however small, that is remotely pertinent to what he's trying to find out. In the back of my mind lurks the terror that if I don't satisfy him, the interrogation could graduate to torture. Over and over, I explain—I apologize—that I was only in this country for one full day before I was taken, that's why there's so much I don't know.

Some length of days later, he returns for a second interrogation. He repeats every question he asked the first time, but in randomized order. He's checking my answers for consistency; he probes every discrepancy, however trivial. He presses me on the questions that I told him I didn't know how to answer, he accuses me of withholding information. This time, he won't accept "I don't know" as a response. "You are lying," he keeps saying. "Tell me! We can make you talk."

The threat becomes more specific: "We have electricity..."

I break down sobbing. I beg him to believe me, I've told him everything I can, I simply don't have the information he wants, please don't hurt me... He tells me to stop crying, but I can't. As I go on weeping hysterically, the interrogator's irritation seems to give way to embarrassment. Someone puts a small orange into my hand, as if placating a child, and they take me back to my cell. They don't interrogate me again.

* * *

As instructed by the chef, I pray that God will help me endure.

I pray every morning and night, on my knees. This is not a habit I had before my kidnapping. I did it for a little while after I swore, for the last time, that I wasn't ever going to return to the gay bar or see Dale again. I had been determined then to get myself right with God. Daily prayers. Weekly Mass. No more masturbation—or at least less of it. No more covert reading of gay-themed literature in the college library. I didn't continue the daily prayers for very long, though. I became lax. I lacked discipline.

This time, I'm going to keep up the discipline. I have to. I need structure. And more importantly, I need God. God will get me through this. God will get me out of this.

I always start by praying that whatever reason my captors are holding me will be resolved quickly, so I can go home.

Then I ask for help in the meantime. I pray for strength. I pray that I won't cry. I pray that the guards won't be angry with me. I pray that I won't get sick. I pray that I won't get depressed. I pray for help filling my day constructively. I pray to be able to keep my thoughts positive and controlled.

After a while, I feel guilty that I'm always praying for myself. I pray for Bernie, that he's safe, that they haven't gotten him too. I pray that he won't feel guilty about my kidnapping. I pray for my family, that they will be comforted. I pray, vaguely, for the prisoners in other cells.

I always include thanks in my prayers, so that I'm not just asking God for things. Thank you for my health. For the food, such as it is. For the mattress. For the light. For my toothbrush and toothpaste. That they give me water safe for drinking. That they don't make me hold my pee for twenty-four hours. That they haven't hurt me too badly. That since the photo, my family at least knows I'm alive.

I try praying the rosary, the prayers I can remember, anyway, counting the Hail Marys on my fingers. It will help pass the time, I think. But this devotion never meant anything to me. I understand that the repetition is supposed to be meditative, but it just feels rote. If I'm going to pray, I want to talk to God. The rosary just kills time, and not in a way that brings me any satisfaction. I give it up.

I give up praying the rosary for the same reason I gave up regular morning and evening prayers last fall, when I tried to get into the habit. It didn't take long for my prayers to feel repetitious, stale, meaningless. Very soon I'm having the same problem maintaining the habit of regular prayer here, in my cell. I'm always praying for the same things. There's never anything new to pray for: my days are the same, and I have no idea what's happening in the lives of my loved ones. Praying becomes a chore, a memorized list of petitions and thanksgivings I run through twice a day.

I start forgetting to pray, especially at night. Or I don't even forget, I just don't feel like doing it, I'm too despondent by the end of the day.

Whenever I forget or skip, I berate myself for it later: You idiot, don't fuck this up. I have made a commitment to God, a commitment to pray in a disciplined way. And if I want God to follow through in helping me cope and, ultimately, getting me out of here, then I need to follow through in keeping my commitment to him.

I know, cerebrally, that this is a crude, childish theology; I attended a Catholic high school and college, I received a responsible theological education. But, viscerally, I cling to the notion that I have a bargain with God because it affords me some sense of control over my fate. A greater certainty of hope. If my actions don't make a difference in securing God's intervention, then I'm just sitting here waiting on God's inscrutable will—and hoping that his will includes my release. No, don't go down that road, I cannot afford to get critically philosophical about this subject. I have to believe that God and I have an understanding.

* * *

When the guards come to take me for my toilet run, they find me standing, blindfolded, beside my mattress, a bottle in each hand. I am ready for them, trying to make things more efficient for them. Trying to please them. A model prisoner.

A guard puts his hand around my arm to lead me out of the cell. Some guards do this roughly; this particular guard's grip is gentler. "Hello, Jérémie," the guard says. He pronounces my name as in French, with a zh.

I recognize his deep voice immediately: it's the kind guard, the one who brought me tea and stroked my head when I cried for the first time on the day of my kidnapping. My heart leaps with happiness. I am surprised but thrilled that he knows my name.

"Hello," I reply.

"Makmoud," he says.

I assume it's an order in Arabic, he's trying to tell me to do something. "I'm sorry, I don't understand."

Lifting my wrist, he makes me gently tap myself on the chest as he repeats my name. "Jérémie." Then he makes me tap his chest. "Makmoud."

Ah. I feel I ought to say something. "Pleased to meet you."

"Hello," he says back.

That's the end of our exchange. As Makmoud leads me by my arm through the cell door, the other guard who is waiting there stops us by slapping his hand flat across my chest. The guard says something in Arabic, in a disapproving tone, to which Makmoud responds in inflections that I interpret as, "What's the big deal? Get off my back."

After that, Makmoud regularly says hello when it's his turn to take me to the bathroom or bring me food. I assume he does it regularly, anyway, I have no way of knowing if there are occasions when he's here but silent. I thought that I might learn to distinguish different guards merely by their grip or their gait, like a blind person whose other senses have become heightened, but that doesn't happen: I need to hear the guards' voices, and even then they often sound alike to me as they issue brief orders. Assuming he greets me regularly, Makmoud only appears for a few days at intervals of several days. There must be a rotation for guard duty.

Although Makmoud always uses my name when he greets me, I agonize over whether to use his when I reply. I am ignorant of the proper etiquette for our circumstances. I don't want to offend him by coming across as either inappropriately familiar or coolly distant. In the end, I settle on not using his name because of my impression that other guards disapprove of our fraternizing. By confining myself to a minimal "Hello," I hope to minimize their disapproval.

Even if I don't use Makmoud's name, the fact that I know it, and that he uses mine, makes me feel a little more like my humanity is intact. To Makmoud, at least, I am more than the anonymous prisoner in cell number whatever. I think of him as my friend among the guards; in this place, mere acknowledgment equates with friendship. I regard Makmoud as someone who is concerned about me, who will look out for my interests and well-being.

* * *

I don't know how long I've been here. When I first arrived, I was too wrapped up in my misery to think about it. Then I kept assuring myself that they would let me go in just a few more days, so I wasn't worrying about keeping track. And then so much time passed, that now I can't figure out how much it's been. I try to count back. But my days are so empty, and so much the same, there are too few landmarks to help me distinguish one from the next. My best guess is that I've been here now... a couple of weeks? Jesus—that long?

I need to start keeping a tally. Scratches on the wall, like in stories. I intuit that the guards won't want me doing this, so I need to find some patch on the wall where they're unlikely to notice. I decide to do it on the wall parallel to my mattress but on the opposite side of the cell. Facing my mattress when they enter, the guards will most often have their backs to that wall.

The plan is this: Every morning, at breakfast time, I will use my fingernail, or maybe the tine of my plastic fork, to trace a tiny notch in a grimy patch on the wall, not far above the floor. I will trace six notches, and on the seventh day I will run a line through the set, so I can easily see the number of weeks.

I'm hoping, of course, that I will be released before the number of days gets high enough to be counted in weeks.

How long have other hostages been held? I wish I'd paid more attention to news stories about hostages. I remember last summer, a plane was hijacked and taken to Beirut. The passengers were freed... in a couple of weeks, as I recall.

Then there were the hostages taken at the embassy in Iran when I was in high school. How long were they held? I have the number 444 in my head. Four hundred forty-four days? Jesus, that's over a year!

No. No, I'm not going to be here that long. That's not possible. Clearly, the government has learned better how to resolve these situations. It was 444 days the first time; now they've gotten it down to a couple of weeks.